Keeping Close Track of Chats, Word for Word

By

Katherine Boehret

April 17, 2012 6:00 p.m. ET

People store their emails, photos and documents online to keep them from being lost or accidentally deleted. But what about the records we never save to begin with, like phone conversations and text messages? These hold a lot of useful data and can sometimes be the only point of reference for important conversations.

I've been testing Calltrunk, a service that records, stores and transcribes calls initiated by its app or website; a manual feature on iPhones and Skype also enables recording incoming calls. It uses...